Stratos Filalithis

Head of Website and Communication Technologies

Stratos is the head for the University Website & Communications team, supporting the University's key strategic goals, while overseeing the management and support of the University’s corporate Web Content Management System (EdWeb) and other high-level University online services.

Recent posts by Stratos Filalithis

Most technology horizon reports these days seem to have a common reference: Conversational interfaces. Whether a chatbot, a voice assistant or any other machine-learning driven interface, this appears to be the next frontier in audience engagement. To reflect on this, and how these would be useful in a Higher Education environment, we ran a project last year focussing in voice interaction design and standards. It was an interesting journey, with very interesting outputs which are available for all University colleagues.Continue reading: Conversational interfaces at the University of Edinburgh

The University Website team had the honour to be invited to the inaugural Thunder Day event, organised by the Hubert Burda publishing company in Hamburg, Germany. The main theme of the day was how open collaboration can help when delivering digital content through the web.

Before we turn our attention to the upcoming academic year, our team is taking a step back to review the most significant achievements of 2017. The main areas of focus are on web strategy and governance, continuous work to support the University web development community, EdWeb enhancements and procuring a replacement web search service.

Just before leaving for my summer holidays, I had the great chance to travel to Canterbury and the University of Kent, where the annual Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW for short) was hosted. This was the 21st year for the conference, which underlined the success of this long-standing networking and collaboration opportunity.

I had the chance to attend the inaugural DIGIT Leaders’ Summit at Our Dynamic Earth. This event was focused in how technology has permeated all facets of modern organisations, becoming an equal, if not integral, partner in setting core business strategies.

Back in September 2016, the University initiated a procurement exercise to replace its current central search engine. As we are nearing on deciding the successful vendor, it’s a great time to provide a project review, revisit the vision and explore the opportunities this new search engine will present.

We are nearing the end of 2016. This provides us with a great opportunity to review our actions, highlight our achievements, learn from our experiences and set our goals for more success in 2017. These are just a few (but definitely the most significant) areas we worked to develop and improve this year.

Our team has relocated, starting Monday 21 November, to Argyle House, near the Edinburgh College of Art Lauriston campus. This will provide us with an opportunity to collaborate closer with colleagues in LTW and other ISG divisions, while taking advantage of the new facilities.

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